Parallels Entwined
by SilverStarsAndMoons
Summary: Izzie and Addison are both extraordinary doctors and amazingly compassionate women. Take a journey through their amazingly similar childhoods and lives and find out why this femslash ship is one of the most popular of the Grey's fandom.
1. Chapter 1

_How can we be so much the same and feel so different? How can we be so different and feel so much the same? - Stellaluna_

When you were born, the sun was setting over the Manhattan skyline, and your mother could see straight across the city from her room in Mount Sinai hospital. It had been a long, hard labour, but surprisingly, you were born naturally, with little complication. The nurse said to your mother that she could already see that you'd be one to watch, because when you were born, you were born with your baby-blue eyes wide open.

Your father, a steel tycoon from England, didn't care much for the birthing of babies. He was at home with your older brother, his favourite and heir. Through the years, you'd notice that although he'd pat you absently on the head in passing, you couldn't really say you'd had a strong father figure in your life. The fact is, your father didn't really know what to do with a little girl. The fact is, you were an afterthought – an accident. It's sometimes funny how the accidents end up as the influential stars of the family.

It was an April day, that day you were born. The trees were starting to bud out, and the forsythia was in bloom. As your mother finally delivered you, a red ray of the sun fell across the end of her bed and onto your little head. Whatever colour your hair had been turned a burnished flame-red. You were stuck with this blessing for the rest of your life – through taunts of "carrot-head" and "ginger kid", even though your skin was purest ivory, with barely a freckle. As an adult, men would tell you that your hair was what attracted them to you and your charms.

That day you were born, your mother was crying because she didn't know what to do with another baby, especially a girl. That day you were born, your brother was kicking at the base of your crib because he didn't want a baby sister. That day you were born, your father sat in his study and secretly hoped you'd be another boy in case something happened to Hugh, your older brother. That day you were born, it's safe to say that you were unwanted.

However, you pushed yourself into that cold family and you never stopped pushing. It's why they learned to love and respect you. It's why you became the best in your field.

They named you Addison Forbes Montgomery, a high-class, male-sounding name. However, you never let them forget that girls are more than sugar and spice. You were Addison Marie until the day you died.

So you were born to live in a trailer. That doesn't mean that you didn't struggle the minute you entered the world. That doesn't mean that you were going to accept it, for God's sake. There wasn't a minute that you didn't stand in the gutter that was your life and stare at those far-away stars. You were born to reach them and to never let go.

You were born at a dingy county hospital, three hours outside of Seattle, Washington. Your mother was a sixteen-year-old single mother, an unfortunate legacy she would pass to you later in life. For now, though, the nurses gasped when you were born – a perfect baby with slate-grey eyes, golden curls, and pink skin. You would have thought that they expected you to be some kind of three-headed monster, from the way they treated your mother. Another knocked-up trailer trash brat. Another dirty kid from the other side of the tracks. She screamed and cried and vomited and even shit on the table, but they didn't show her an ounce of sympathy. You learned early that people are assholes and that if you want to be loved and respected, you'd better damn well work for it.

You didn't have a father and according to both your mother and your grandmother, you never had one. You learned later that he was a deadbeat who had ended up in jail for stabbing another deadbeat in a bar fight. Your mother was a pretty blonde cheerleader that he'd raped outside of the weedy football stadium. Because she was Catholic, and because she tried to hold onto innocence, you ended up being brought to term. However, you always felt that she resented you, and because she never told you why until you were a respected surgeon, you just tried to stay out of her way. Even as a baby, your cries were stifled – your face turned into the crib pillows.

The day was beautiful – an October morning, as bright and brassy as any hooker hanging around outside of the diner on a late Saturday night. Hospital windows don't open, but if they did, you would have felt the fresh wind on your face and smelled the slightly smoky air that signifies autumn, and Thanksgiving. Maybe you sensed it, because for the rest of your life, you adored holidays and pored over the Christmas Sears catalog, tracing the smiling face of the little girl in her red dress as you tried to block out your mother's drunken screaming and your grandmother's pleading.

Yeah, it wasn't a great situation to be born in. Yeah, your mother didn't want you at all and it was only thanks to lapsed religion that you didn't end up on the floor of an OR in a bloody, crumbled mess. But maybe your mother felt that even though you'd wrecked her life, you deserved something beautiful. Maybe she felt even then you'd rise above the situation you'd been thrust into.

So, Isobel Mary Catherine Stevens, you heeded her unspoken advice and once you'd figured out how to play this dirty old world for all it's got, you lived up to your melodic name and showed those bastards that you were a lady and they could shove their "baby" and "chickie" up their goddamn asses.

Christening day is normally a happy time in every Catholic family's history. You dedicate your child to God and hope that they decide to live a decent life. Sure, there have been many kids who decided to leave the church, or torture small animals, or do other heinous things that would make the Baby Jesus cry, but a lot of kids who are raised in the Catholic faith put it to good use. They put aside the guilt and focus on the beauty and majesty of the oldest Church in the Christian religion. Of course, you can't convince a baby that later in life she's going to spend hours on her knees, praying to a gold-flecked statue painted in Virgin blue. A baby doesn't think past her next feeding or diaper change, and really, all she really cares about is being held close and loved and knowing that she's wanted. But sometimes, that's what church does – the great Mother reaches down and cuddles you close, and all your troubles melt away in the song of a thousand Glorias and the scent of incense wreathing around the candles on the altar.

Your head is covered in soft red ringlets that make most people smile and reach out to touch one. However, your own family doesn't care if you're the most beautiful baby in the world – they're concerned with making a good first impression. That means you, too, Addison. How they expect a four-month-old baby who can't do much more than drool to make a good impression, God knows. But that's the rules for today and somehow, deep inside, you know that you're expected to do something.

You're fussy when they put you into the Italian eyelet-lace christening dress that's almost too big for your thin little baby body. You're also too hot, since they've dressed you as if it's December and it's mid-August. But your grandmother has convinced your mother (never a very confident woman at the best of times) that if you're not dressed in a thick cloth diaper, a pair of woolen white tights, a onesie, the dress itself, and a scratchy lace bonnet, you will catch your death of cold. Your mother goes to slip on the rubber pants for good measure and that's when you suddenly feel that this maybe isn't going to be the best day.

All you really want is your mother to hold you and maybe feed you a nice warm bottle, but it's time to perform and your godmother, a loud upper-class woman with a braying voice is holding you loosely in her arms and marching you up the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral while calling over her shoulder to your little brother, who is glaring at you over his picture Bible. You and your brother will never be very close, throughout your whole lives, and that's a shame, because maybe you could have conquered the world of Manhattan socialites if you'd stuck together. You start to cry, but are immediately silenced by your godmother patting your back firmly as you're carried up the aisle of the endless intricate nave.

You can see your mother standing beside the font on the carved altar of the church, but even as you reach out your arms for her, you're handed off into another unfamiliar pair of arms. The choir intones in an unfamiliar language that you'll learn later is Latin as your head is washed with cold holy water that makes you wet your pants and squirm and begin to cry in indignity. But it's not over – now they're smearing your soft little forehead with funny-smelling oil that makes you sneeze a little bit. The whole church makes noises of pleasure at the sound of your delicate sneezes.

You're placed back into your godmother's arms, and she decides to jiggle you up and down a bit to stop your crying. You're not really sure why no one is giving you to your mother, because you're hungry and cold and wet and all you really want is to be cuddled to her chest, but as you twitch your itchy little legs in the hot tights, the priest begins to talk, and talk, and talk. It seems like forever and you finally lose your patience. With a look that will be mirrored on your face every time something goes wrong in your OR in the future, you make use of your red-haired temper and let out a scream that echoes off the angels on the clerestory windows, forty feet above you.

Finally, you get what you want – your mother, after a murderous look from your father and several sniffs from your godparents and the other ladies present, takes you into the back room and comforts you. When you get older, you won't remember any of this, but the best way to get you to stop crying after a hard day of losing patients will be to rub your back, stroke your hair, and rock you back and forth, which is what your mother does now. She changes your diaper; she takes off the hot tights, she gives you her breast, even though breastfeeding is forbidden among upper-class women.

Your last thought is of warmth and comfort and light through the coloured stained-glass above your head, and every time you enter a church in the future, you'll feel just like this and be glad that church is a heaven and not a hell.

You're not really lucky enough to have a nice christening, because your mother can't afford it and the only one who really cares is your grandmother. You're a quiet, introspective baby who's prone to getting a lot of colds, because your mother and grandmother both smoke like chimneys and they don't really care if you're around the smoke or not. You don't cry very much, because you've learned that every time you do, your mother grimaces, or yells, or cries, and it's your grandmother who roughly tends to your needs. No one really holds you close unless it's a stranger – no one gives you the love and comfort that you need. Maybe that's why in the future, you turn to any gentle person who will give you a hug and rub your back. You constantly look for human contact. It's also why you turn out to be a wonderful doctor.

They troop off to the old stone church on the corner of Nothing and Nowhere (or the freeway and the old highway that crosses it in the middle of a bare field). This church has been around since the first settlers came across the plains of Montana and the Midwest, and it's really quite lovely – intimate, full of character, and set with carefully-made stained glass. As your mother, who's holding you loosely on her hip, passes under the stone arch that's the entrance, you reach out your little hand to touch the little lamb on the doorjamb, and get your fingers roughly scraped across the stone for your pains. Your lower lip trembles, but you don't cry, even though one of your little fingertips is bleeding.

You're a little older than most children, because your mother couldn't afford the fee that the priest charges to baptize babies. Your grandmother has trembled in fear every time you caught a cold or had to be taken to the expensive walk-in clinic down the road when your fever got too high or your bottom too raw with the thrush. Now, though, she doesn't worry – you'll be saved and if you die, well, you'll go to heaven. It's nice that she cares, but you would have preferred her to come and rock you at night instead of ignoring you, making you cry and cry until you fall asleep, your little tummy growling, or your diaper so wet that it soaks through to your sheets.

The priest is a gentle man – he has a nice smile. You're a sucker for a guy who will smile at you, so you reach out your little hands and giggle as he nuzzles his soft beard against your fingertips. He notices that you're bleeding, and he tells you in his soft Irish accent that he'll make it all better. Before you can blink, he's bandaged it up and drawn a happy face on the white band-aid. You wiggle your finger in front of your face and laugh again. You're such a cheerful, curious child, if only someone would pay attention.

The ceremony is short, but you don't want to let go of the priest's gleaming white robes. You cuddle against him, your head resting on his shoulder, and whimper a bit when your mother roughly snatches you back, telling the priest that she's got a shift to get to. He bids you goodbye and you love the way he says "Isobel". You watch him all the way out the door and when the door closes behind you and your family, you feel a physical pain at the loss. Your mother can't understand why you won't stop wailing and even though it's only early spring, she lays you on the bench outside of the church and roughly pulls down your pants, checking for wetness.

The air is cold on your little bottom, but you ignore it, because the sky is so beautiful and your eyes are big and bright in the beautiful light. When you get older and go to confession every week, without fail, you remember this light and you imagine that your soul must look like this. It's that light you fight for every time you try to save a patient.

Modest beginnings can give rise to extraordinary beings. Maybe it's the circumstances – maybe it's the treatment. But there comes a time in your life where you accept what you're given or you push so hard against it that you fall out on the top of the world. You either sit and cry about losing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or you run until you find it again.

Thank God that you decided to be a chaser of rainbows.


	2. Chapter 2

Tonight, the storm is crashing and blowing and ripping around your windows, and when you wake up, you can't get out of bed, because you're too frightened. Tonight, your thumb finds its way back into your mouth, even though you've been strictly told by your dentist to keep it out of there, or you'll have to wear braces, and you hate the way they look. Tonight, you really wish that your mother wouldn't make you sleep alone in a big nursery with no one near, not even your nanny, who used to sleep in a bed next to yours.

You're six years old and you're already a precocious child. You have long, long red hair, because your mother really doesn't pay much attention to you enough to cut it and your nanny loves to run the silky strands through her fingers when she sings you a lullabye. Your blue eyes are considered your best feature. They're the colour of the blue sky on an autumn day, with a gentle expression that belies your easygoing nature. You keep that expression all of your life, and in the future, labouring mothers will request to be awake so that they can see your gentle eyes looking down at them, making just them feel like the only patient you care about.

You're tall for your age and you smile a lot, even when you don't feel like it, because you've been taught that no one wants to see a frowning face, especially on a child. You're a little emotionally neglected, even though you have everything you want. Shortly after your slightly disastrous christening, your father hired a nanny and you forgot what it was like to cry for Mommy. In a way, he gave you a gift, because never again did you feel like no one loved you – well, that is, until your nanny was fired when you were two because she gave you a chocolate cupcake on your birthday and you're not allowed to have sweets (you still can't figure out why). When you get to be a world-class attending with a perfect figure, you still take the time to reward yourself with chocolate at the end of a bad day. Screw what everyone else thinks.

When you were a toddler, and when you lost your nanny, you turned from a gentle, happy, well-adjusted child into a crying, lost little girl. You had been toilet-trained early, but you started wetting your pants again, so much that your mother lost patience with you and gave you sharp spankings every time you had an accident. You woke up through the night, crying and calling for someone, but your parents had been trained in the cry-it-out method and you were ignored unless you got so upset that you threw up, and then you were punished. You moped through the day and refused to play with your toys. You started to pull out your pretty red hair.

It was an immense relief for everyone when your current nanny, an Irish girl named Kathleen, came to look after you. The day she came, you were hiding behind your mother's skirts, but she smiled at you and opened her arms and spoke your name in her soft lilting accent, and you immediately fell in love, letting her pick you up and burying your face in her shoulder. Kathleen, or Katie, has been with you ever since and it's Katie you call out for now.

She appears from the room next door, smoothing down her long white nightie and coming over to your bed. "Addison, lovey, shhh, shh, pet," she croons and you reach out your arms with a hiccup towards her. She gathers you into her arms and sets you on her lap, grimacing a little as she moves you back onto the floor, pulling up your wet nightie and wrapping you in a blanket. She picks you up again and runs a hot bath for you, washing the tears away from your face and listening to your stammered apologies for being such a baby. But Katie understands that you're just afraid of the storm, because Hugh, your brother, has told you that sometimes rural New York gets hit with tornadoes. You murmur as Katie wraps you warmly in a towel that you don't want to get blown away and killed, and Katie vows that she will speak to your father about Hugh for the fifteenth time because she's getting awfully tired of you doing poorly in school because your sleep has been broken by nightmares and fears.

When you're once again dressed in a clean, dry nightie, Katie carries you back to your bed, which has been changed by the maid. You wait anxiously, hoping that she'll decide to break the rules tonight and curl up beside you through the storm, which is flashing and crashing madly outside. She catches the look on your face and knows she'll catch it if the master and mistress find out that she's stayed with you when you're supposed to learn to sleep alone, but you're so pitiful, with your white little face and your huge blue eyes, that she throws caution to the wind and gives you a kiss on the top of your head. You reach out your arms to be picked up and that's when the lights go out.

You're normally not one given to hysterics, but there's something about the dark that just scares you, and so you start to scream, clawing wildly for Katie, who finds you and holds you close to her, whispering in your ear that it's all right, you're okay, and that it's just a power outage. She lights the candle underneath the red glass in front of the icon of the Virgin Mary, in the corner of your room. Immediately, the friendly rosy glow calms you and you curl up next to Katie in bed, feeling yourself getting sleepy as she draws with her finger on your back.

Later on in life, when Derek throws you out into the storm, you'll remember this night when you were six years old and someone came to comfort you. It's why you turned to Mark, soaked to the skin, after Derek left and went to Seattle. It's why when he murmurs your name and sings the special lullabye that all of you heard as children, his warm arms against your stomach, his lips on your hair, that you become a little bit okay. He'll have to do that during thunderstorms for a year before you're able to be an adult again and sleep on your own.

_Little child, be not afraid . . . _

The rain is falling outside the trailer, and when it does, you can't sleep. You've been told to never touch any metal inside during a thunderstorm, because you could get a bad shock from the lightning that is inexorably drawn to the metal sides and roof outside. You're a pretty brave six-year-old; after all, you beat up boys twice your size in the schoolyard and aren't afraid to talk back to your teacher, who considers you sassy and annoying, although probably the most beautiful little girl she's ever seen. However, tonight you're frightened, because the thunder is so angry and loud and your mother is drunk again.

Since you've been little, this scenario has been constant in your life. Your mother, Rose Stevens, is an incredibly irresponsible, selfish teenager who shouldn't be allowed to have a child, and likely wouldn't have you if your grandmother wasn't there to provide care when Rose can't. Rose finds you annoying. She finds you to be a nuisance and she reminds you constantly that it's only by the grace of God that you exist anyway. And she never breaks up the cruelty by being kind; there are times that she'll give you a short hug or ask about school, but it's normally when she's going to take off for two weeks with a guy that you've never met and that you'll never see again.

No, it's been your grandmother who's tried to shield you from your mom's wrath. You were almost taken away, almost, when you were three. The social worker came to call because a neighbour heard you crying for most of the day. Your grandmother had gone to work and your mother was supposed to be taking care of you on your day off. Instead, she chose to go to California with Duke, a biker from Oregon, and your grandmother didn't come home until 6 pm.

The social worker found you wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV, crying from hunger, with a massive diaper rash, because you didn't know how to go to the toilet without help, or change your clothes when you had an accident. It was only sweet-talking on the part of your grandmother that kept you in that trailer, and you almost forgave your mother that night when you were clean and dry and warm in bed. However, you never forgot what it was like to be totally alone with no one to help you.

Later on, you learned to be self-sufficient and to not mind so much when no one could help you. The best approach, you learned, was to stay out of your mother's way and not bother her. Unfortunately, you got sick often, and someone had to sit by your bedside and keep an eye on your fever or give you cough medicine. You also turned out to be a bedwetter, which made your mother incredibly angry. At the tender age of five, you learned how to strip your bed and put the sheets in the washer, and if your grandmother or mother heard the old washing machine knocking away in the middle of the night, they said nothing. Nor did they say anything when they found you curled up in your blanket on the floor of your room in the morning.

Your grandmother hears you crying tonight, but she has to wait until your mother leaves or she'll accuse her of loving you better than she loves her own daughter. Right now, it's true – Mary Catherine McPhee (she changed her name back to her maiden name after Rose's father died) does love you more than she loves Rose, because Rose is difficult; Rose is mentally ill; and Rose is neglectful to you, and you're the light of Mary's life. Once your mother bangs out the door angrily, peeling away in your rusting old car, she slips into your room and gathers you up into her arms.

"Shh, Cricket, don't cry. You're such a brave girl. Don't cry." The soothing voice calms you, and you inhale her Yardley English Rose talc scent that has comforted you since you were a newborn. She calls you Cricket because you're bright as a cricket, the top of your class and advanced for your age. Later on, when you actually find a teacher that doesn't consider you another specimen of trailer trash; you'll be skipped up a grade. When you enter your internship, you'll be one of the youngest in your field. No one will know except for another young intern named George, and he's only younger because he was born in December and is struggling to catch up to everyone else.

You snuffle against her neck and your tears stop almost as fast as they've begun. However, you don't let go of Mary until she sings you your favourite lullabye, and then you slip into sleep. Later on, when you're a neonatal resident, you sing that same lullabye to the sick, sick little babies who cry hopelessly, knowing that no one can hold them. When they inevitably die, you hold their little bodies in your arms and sing again, even though your voice is tuneless.

_The storm pounds harsh against the glass like an unwanted stranger, there is no danger, I am here tonight . . . _

It's funny how we lose our reservations in a thunderstorm. How when you're lying on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night, everything seems so much worse because he's gone and he's never coming back, and he only held you once, his false warmth belied by his cold, cold hands. How when you are stuck outside, your hands against the expensive leaded glass door, and you can see him, SEE him, through the glass, his carefully-tousled hair a blur through the rain, and you know he'll never let you in again, your life is irreparably broken and it will never be the same again. It's easy to give over to hysterics; it's easy to forget that the darkest hour is before dawn and behind the clouds, the sun shines all the same.

And why should you always remember that? Eternal optimists are so annoying, and covering your grief over with a thin veneer of smiley-happiness is not dealing with it, either. But. You both do remember that grief, while horrible, doesn't last forever. You remember that life can get better if you give it a push in the right direction. And you remember that no one is really there for you except for yourself.

So you shine, you shine brightly, through the dark clouds and through the rain, and you smile when it hurts and you laugh when you want to cry. Because what do stars do best? They glow. And God knows that when you were both made, you were born to be stars.


	3. Chapter 3

Okay, how did you end up here? You're sitting in a bathroom stall, somewhere on the third floor of your fancy private school, and you're crying. Again. Honestly, Addison. Why are you here again? Shouldn't twelve-year-old girls be thinking about boys, and makeup, and the best way to obtain both?

Well, on any other given day, you would be part of that crowd. You'd be sitting at the lunch table, twirling a fry around in your already-shapely surgeon's hands, and waxing poetical about Billy Oppenheimer, who sits across from you in biology. And your girlfriends would be laughing, and you would be chuckling, too, even though Hayley Kilroy sits right next to Billy and you can't help but notice the way she swishes her blonde hair over her ears and gives you a funny grin when Billy makes her frog waddle across the table. But, whatever. Yeah, you would be talking about boys, but something happened in bio class and now you don't want to come out of the bathroom.

You're a smart girl. You know all about the female anatomy. And you went through sex ed class two weeks ago, so you know about periods, and how they come every month, and how they mean you're a woman. But what they didn't explain were the waves upon waves of cramps, and the way that periods catch you unawares, like in the middle of biology class when Hayley pointed at your leg, just under your short green-and-white kilt, and said, "Hey, Addison, did you cut yourself or something?" And you suddenly realized what was going on . . . and haven't returned to class since.

Sister Mary Lawrence is the teacher for biology. It's actually kind of funny, having a nun be the teacher for a class about science, but you actually sort of adore the way she combines God and the natural world together to work in tandem, the way that you always felt that they should work. You don't believe, even at the age of twelve, that these things are separate from each other. So consequently, you're one of Sister Mary Lawrence's best students, and she really, really likes you. But you're kind of afraid of her at the moment, because you just basically skipped her class.

That's kind of the least of your problems. You don't have a quarter for the pad machine and you don't have any Tylenol for your cramps, and you're not sure you can stand up, because everyone's going to know that you got your period and it's just a little more than you can take right now.

The bell rings; class is out. Girls stream into the bathroom, talking and laughing, water goes on and off, toilets flush, and everyone tries to get in a potty break before the next class starts in seven minutes. You have English Literature next, normally one of your favourite classes (okay, let's just face it – you love every single class except for PE), but you don't move. The corridors fall silent. You close your eyes.

And then you hear the door bang open and see sensible black shoes tapping across the tiled floor, stopping at each stall, until they finally end up at the door of your stall and you hear a soft knock on the door. "Who's in there?" comes the voice of Sister Mary Lawrence.

You've been taught to speak when spoken to, so despite yourself, you pipe up in a little voice: "Addison Montgomery, Sister." You're a bit stammery, but your voice is strong and you're proud that it doesn't sound like you're crying.

She knocks on the door again. "Addison, are you all right? It's not like you to not return to class after I let you be excused."

You sigh, look at the ground. "No," you half-whisper, cursing inwardly as the tears well up in your eyes again. Why didn't anyone tell you that getting your period is really traumatic? You love to look at things in a scientific way, but the problem is, it really only tells one story.

The nun sighs on the other side of the door. "Open the door, Addison." Her voice is authoritative, but still gentle, so you unlock the door and give it a slight push with the side of your wrist, because your hands are clenched in embarrassment around some wet tissues that you can't seem to let go of.

Sister Mary Lawrence is framed in the doorway, and the look on her face suggests she isn't too happy. However, when she notices the tears on your cheeks and the awkward way you're crunched up on the floor, her face softens. She kneels beside you, pushing her wimple behind her ears. "What happened?"

Telling a teacher was not the way you imagined announcing your "womanhood". Actually, you thought you'd tell your nanny, Katie, first. Katie's not really your nanny anymore; actually, she's just there to make sure someone's home after school to get your dinner, and you're pretty sure that in another year, she's not going to be there at all. But this nun is one of the younger, non-bristly-chinned ones. She's got gentle brown eyes and a pleasant, if not pretty, face. So you don't really mind as you whisper, "I think – I mean, I did, get my period." The last word is said almost silently, but Sister Mary Lawrence doesn't work with teenage girls for nothing.

"Mmm. And I take it that this is the first one?" You nod, scrubbing a tissue across your face, flicking your red ponytail over your shoulder. You fold your spindly legs closer to your chest. "I don't have . . . anything?" Your voice rises slightly on the last word, like a question, in the manner of all twelve-year-olds.

"That's okay." The nun gets to her feet, pulls a quarter from somewhere (are there actually pockets in that robe?) and fiddles with the machine until one of those generic pads that are really more like diapers slides out. She hands it to you and you try to smile.

Closing the door, you're able to take care of things. Thankfully, you managed to catch it before it made a huge mess in your panties, so there's not much to clean up. Once you're ready, you step outside the stall and carefully wash your hands, avoiding the nun's gaze. "Thanks," you whisper, and then double over as a cramp hits you, crying out a little.

"Oh, darling girl," Sister Mary murmurs and puts her hands on your shoulders. "Sometimes that hurts, doesn't it? You poor thing." She rubs your back a little and then asks you if you want to call someone to take you home. You nod emphatically.

On the way out, you run into Hayley Kilroy, who gives you a strange look as you pass. "You look awfully white, Addison. Were you throwing up in there?" The nun looks disapproving, but you shake your head. "No, I'm okay."

She gives you a little, almost flirtatious smile. Or maybe you're imagining things. No, she just did it again. A little flutter in your stomach breaks through the cramps and you manage to smile back. She puts a hand on your shoulder. "See you tomorrow, then!"

Okay, maybe not all twelve-year-olds like boys.

When it happens to you, you're at volleyball practice and you're wearing white shorts, and okay, you all get the picture. And it's embarrassing, because everyone points and laughs, and it gets a little Carrie-esque. The problem is, you can't even write it off as a normal happening. This is your first period and you're already fourteen years old.

So you drop the ball and run off the court and contemplate running home, but you'll have to pass the diner and the gas station, and you know that Josh Poller, the hot eighteen-year-old son of the mechanic, works on Wednesdays. And what's worse about all of this is that your best friend, Anna Wilkinson, saw this happen and she just laughed at you. And your grandmother is out tonight and your mother is useless. So you've got no one to help you with this.

Nevertheless, you curve and run into the bathroom instead. You take stock of the situation. Okay, so you get protection. You go home. And then what? Do you even have pads in the bathroom? Does your mother even think of that stuff? What if there are those tampon things instead? How do you even put those in? You can feel the hot tears behind your eyes but you do your best to keep them back as you fumble with the pocket of your shorts where you know you stashed a quarter that you found on the gym floor before practice.

Of course, the machine has to be broken. It has to be broken because you need it, even though you've barely looked twice at it since you came to St. Julia's Secondary. You give up and start walking home. It's December and Washington state is cold in December, even though there's no snow where you live. It starts to rain, and you don't have a coat. And you remember that your uniform is still stashed in your locker. Shit.

The trailer park, thankfully, is only a few steps down the road because this is a one-street town on either side of the highway. When you get home, you're shivering and you can feel an ominous tickle at the back of your throat, but you burst in anyway and rub your hands up and down your arms while trying to gasp back the sobs that are threatening to break out of your throat because you're pretty sure your gym shorts are now ruined.

There's a slow, deliberate smoker's cough in the kitchen and your mother's hoarse voice rings out in the trailer's silence. "Izzie?"

"Shit," you mutter, but go into the kitchen anyway. "What do you want, Rose?" You've lately taken to calling your mother by her first name, since "Mom" seems to piss her off. She isn't fazed; she actually kind of likes it, if the truth must be told.

She leans up in her chair, where she's slumped beside a bottle of bourbon and an overflowing ashtray. Thankfully, the bottle doesn't seem to be opened – looks like she just got off her shift at the diner. "What's wrong with you?" she rasps, looking at you for the first time. "You're soaked."

You can feel your lips pooching out into a trembling pout, but you try to control your voice. "Nothing. Just didn't feel good, so I skipped practice." Rose nods, closes her eyes, blows smoke into the air, and then her eyes fall on your shivering form and the fact that your shorts are more red than white at this point. "Are you bleeding?"

"In a matter of speaking," you mutter, and then burst into tears. "Why didn't you tell me it would be like this?" you accuse through your sobs. "Why didn't you tell me they all would laugh and it would hurt, and things wouldn't work?"

Rose normally doesn't deal with you like this – she got so used to ignoring you when you were little that she actually doesn't know what to do when someone cries. She gets up from her chair and awkwardly pats you on the shoulder. "It's just the rag, Izzie. Nothing to get upset about. So it happened to you at school. Happened to me there, too." She clears her throat, coughs again. The woman sounds about eighty and she's barely thirty.

You rub your hands into your eyes and try to control your sobs, which are actually so bad right now that you're hyperventilating. You're about to ask when your grandmother is due home when you suddenly feel warmth about your shoulders as your mother gives you a warm, albeit smoke-scented, hug. It's weird, because it's Rose, and Rose has barely touched you ever, but you lean into it because right now it just feels good to be loved up.

"I'm sorry, Cricket. Someone should have prepared you for this," she whispers into your ear and you suddenly realize that this is what Rose could have been, had she not been raped at sixteen and forced to have a child she didn't want. The moment doesn't last too long, but when you both break apart, your tears have stopped.

You go to the back of the trailer to shower and find that, thankfully, under the sink, there are pads instead of tampons which you just don't feel up to using right now. You change into flannel pajamas and braid your hair, and come back down the hall to sit across from Rose at the table after making yourself a cup of tea. She's into the bourbon now, and a relaxed smile is plastered across her face as she looks at you with half-closed eyes.

"So, you're a woman now," she slurs. "We'd better have the sex talk."

"Spare me, Rose," you retort, taking a long sip of the warm liquid. "We all know what happened when you had the sex talk."

"You're a cheeky little bugger," Rose bites off, but then takes another drink and goes on. "You're pretty, like me. So men are gonna want you. You've got to be choosy. Don't do what I did."

You look repulsed; it's the last thing you'd ever want to do, be like drinking, sloppy, smoker's-cough Rose, working in a diner for the rest of your days. "No chance of that," you shudder, and then suddenly feel bad when she looks sort of hurt. "Sorry," you add quickly, and she shakes her head, staring out the window at the bare patch of lawn where the car sits.

You stir your tea, swirling it into eddies and whirlpools while Rose lights another cigarette. "Rose . . . what if I don't like boys? I mean, yet?" You look confused and brush a blonde tendril out of your eyes. "I mean, all the girls talk about it, but I just don't see what the big deal is."

Rose chuckles, swigs again from the bottle. "Oh, Izzie. That'll change. All girls like boys. And if they don't, well, there's something wrong with them." She hiccups, then adds as she sees your face change, "I don't care if you take years to be attracted to men, Cricket. The main thing is, I just want you to find someone to love. Because I never did. And I likely never will." She looks sad, broken-down, grey in her hair at thirty years old, and you stretch a hand across the table.

"There's still time, Mom."

She scowls. "Did you fix yourself up? Those shorts are never going to be the same, you know."

You sigh. "I know. Can I wash dishes at the diner this week to make some money for new ones?"

"I'll ask Dave. I'm sure he'll be fine with it. You know, he wants to give you a job. I told him to wait a year." She coughs. "You need to be a kid first, not work your life away. Plenty of time for that."

You sigh again. "Yeah. Thanks." So far, being a kid hasn't been the best thing in the world, either.

Okay, so what is with girls and angst and having rough teenage years? They say, sometimes, that the teenage years shape the women that these girls become. Is it true?

You're both resourceful and you think fast on your feet. You don't let trauma get to you, as a rule. You're sympathetic under pressure. And you have a lot of patience. But there's a reason why you choose a man for sex and a woman for everything else (and okay, sex, too). There's a reason why when you cry, you need to be held and taken care of. You can't be prepared for everything. You can't take care of everyone else all the time.

It's because women understand what gets unlocked when you stop being a kid. They understand the foibles of men and the cattiness of peers. And yeah, sometimes you need a good hard cock, but more often, you need someone who knows how to get to your heart.

Empathy – you've got it and you give it. It's the core of being a woman.


	4. Chapter 4

Freeze this moment – hold it in time; look at it like light through a prism. Examine the facets as you would examine a diamond, but don't let them dazzle your eyes to the truth. Diamonds are rocks. Dreams are situations. Rites of passage are in your head. Aren't they?

Lying on your back on the too-soft bed at your friend's seventeenth birthday, you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise. He's a beautiful specimen of a boy; he's got slicked-back blonde hair with a little wave, and clear blue eyes. It's funny how you're oddly detached; this is the star of the private school hockey team, but it's nothing big. It seems normal for him to balance himself above you, his breath sweet with stolen whiskey from the liquor cabinet in the dining room. You've had your share; you're not against the drinking. It burned on the way down but you love the way it tingles in your stomach as he lowers his lips to your collarbone.

He's clumsy; aren't they all? He's a bit younger than you and just ultimately excited to be finally getting to "do it". You've got a pale, lithe body with new swelling breasts and sparse red pubic hair. You twirl your legs around his back as he runs his cold hands over your nipples. When he does thrust, you're not ready for the pain, because no one ever told you that losing your virginity hurts.

It's not just losing your innocence; it's not just breaking your hymen. You're losing the nights that you get to cry and reach out for someone because you're too little to figure out a nightmare on your own. You're losing the jumping into autumn leaves because you can; you're losing the ability to take pleasure in simple things because you don't know any better. Although people say it doesn't, sex does change you. It sets your instincts to adult. And although you can take pleasure in small, childish things, it's not going to be the same wonder. It's never the same thing. Never.

He rolls off you and you're bleeding; you can feel it and you get up, red hair sliding over the forbidden pillow, trying not to spot the coverlet, and dig two fingers into the soreness below. You come up with bright red blood that's drippy like the tears on your face, but he's gone – gone to brag to his friends that he managed to bed Addison Montgomery.

At sixteen, you know you're beautiful. So why do you feel used? You consented. But it wasn't magic. Later in life, you'll explain the magic to Naomi and the rest of the Oceanside gang, and you'll think about how you strived for it and it almost happened – happened in the flutter of your belly when he ran his fingers over your belly button; happened when he touched his mouth to your nipples. But sixteen-year-old boys are never the bringers of magic. Magic is learned; it's an acquired skill.

You're on the bed and you've put your clothes back on, and now you don't care if you're bleeding into your panties, because you feel all wrong. Hayley Kilroy pokes her head in; she's more than a little drunk, and she's staggering a bit. She gasps when she sees you and ducks her head. "Sorry, Addison. You haven't got anyone in here, have you?" She giggles; a little bit perky for the moment, but you shake your head.

"No one's here. Come on."

You pat the bed beside you; she comes and sits unsteadily on it. The motion makes her turn a little white, but you don't mind. "Hey."

"Hey. Why are you here all alone? You look funny."

Your hair is slightly tousled – she clumsily straightens it out with a slightly heavy hand. "You look a bit sick. Did you drink too much, too?"

"No. I was in here with Chad Smythe."

Hayley's eyes widen; she clasps her hands – nothing's better than a great story. "Did you? Did you?"

Before she can quit stuttering like an idiot, you raise a hand. "Yes. Now shut up."

"What was it like?" She's an acolyte; she's hanging on every word. It's ridiculous and beautiful, all at the same time. She's got that soft piecey blonde hair that you almost want to tuck behind her ears – you want to stroke back her messy ponytail and feel her against your chest. This is not a conversation that fits your feelings.

"Painful." It's the first word that pops to your mind; you suddenly feel hot tears against your eyes. "Not pleasant. I don't know, Hayley."

She puts a hand on your knee. "Are you okay?"

"Well, he didn't rape me. I'm fine."

She sighs, twirls a foot on the shag carpeting. A design forms under her toes and you're a little fixated until she speaks again. "I'm sorry."

"Why?"

"Because it should be special. I mean, you know. Something like what it is in the movies. A good memory. I don't know."

You sigh, shift your feet. "Well, life isn't movies."

"No." She raises blue eyes to yours. Hers are a little icier; they have silver rings around the irises. She takes your hand and you let her. "You're so cold."

"It's cold in here."

Without thinking, it happens. You don't mean to kiss her, but she's there and you're on a bit of a high from the sex; if it could be called a high. Her lips are soft and she leans a little forward; the kiss is awkward at best, but it has this sweetness that lights the fire again in your belly.

She doesn't pull away. She puts her arms around your shoulders. There's no tongue; it's so chaste, but when you break apart she's blushing. You smooth her hair back, like you've practiced so many times in your head, and she smiles.

You smile back. "That was special."

Sex is for girls who are sluts. It's what the school teaches and it's what you believe. You're not into that, anyway. You're focused on doing well so that you can get out. You've already decided that you don't want to stay where a drunk mother haunts the trailer and your grandmother's smoker's cough gets worse by the hour. You push your pretty blonde curls behind your ear and you laugh and you drink stolen beer with the football team, but you're not a prom queen and you don't want to be. Those girls get pregnant and drop out of school. You're not Rose. You refuse to be Rose.

He's got the all-American good looks, and flirting seems like a fun thing to do at the time. It's that sense of detachment; it's never really real. He might nip at your ear when you cuddle close to him in the nippy fall air but you never take it seriously. Never, that is, until you're on your back under the bleachers and he's unbuckling his pants.

You're darting your eyes right and left; you just pray he does it fast before someone sees. You didn't consent to this, but just letting him go ahead with it saves time later. He can brag and you can just get on with your life and get out of here in another year. It's the focus and you almost don't notice when he claps a hand over your mouth and presses your arm down with his other hand. You emit a stifled yelp; he takes the pressure off your arm to slap your face.

The sting hurts, but not as much as the thrusts do. It's like a knife up there, in that secret place that no one talks about. You can feel it clear to your back and you buck your hips if only to destroy the sharp pain, to break it up a little. He grunts and actually drools once onto your chest, but when you finally push him off with your powerful track runner's legs, it's too late and his cum is dripping out of you onto the wet grass as you scramble for your pants, which he's thrown somewhere deeper into the dark.

When she finds you, you're still huddled under the bleachers. The tears are bright on your cheeks in the stadium lights and you won't talk. She says she's your best friend, Anna does; she holds you because she knows what happened and you're too upset to speak. This is shameful. Good Catholic girls don't have sex at sixteen years old.

A few weeks pass and you can almost erase the memory. He grins at you cheekily in the hallways and you turn your face away; you work harder in math and chemistry to understand why someone's emotions would turn like that; why it's okay to take someone by force. You curse yourself for letting it happen. You know how to defend yourself. It's the type of thing that's nobody's fault except the asshole who raped you, but who can argue semantics at a time like this?

When you catch his eye in the hallway, the bile rises in your throat and you have to stumble to the toilet to vomit. Anna comes in after her PE class and catches you retching. "Ew, Izzie. Do you have the flu or something?"

You don't bother to correct her. Flu is respiratory; gastroenteritis is stomach-related. "I don't know. It came on suddenly."

"Maybe you're pregnant." She says it as a joke, but you whip around to face her. "What?"

"Iz, God. Calm down." She hands you paper towels and you wipe your face; smooth down your kilt. "Don't joke about that," you warn.

"Well, you're not, right? I mean, you were on the rag last week, I think."

Anna has no sense of time. You roll your eyes. "Try four weeks ago." You pause. "Shit. Four weeks ago . . ."

You suddenly feel another wave of nausea and hold up a hand. "Ugh, God." You vomit again and Anna's eyes widen. "You'd better see the nurse."

"Shut up, and then the whole school knows?" Your eyes fill with tears. "He's such an asshole."

She rubs your shoulders. "I'll go with you to the clinic."

"Everyone's gonna know. If Rose finds out . . ."

"They can't tell Rose."

"They might anyway."

You know it's true, but after school sees you and Anna tramping along the sunlit highway to the clinic at the edge of town. You clutch your backpack and feel a sudden rush of guilt and dread. "What if I am?"

"Well, you could get rid of it."

"It's a sin."

"So the nuns say. I don't believe it."

"I do." No matter what, you do. Anna simply rolls her eyes. "Fine."

The clinic is cold – the air conditioning hasn't been turned off yet. You shiver a little as you sit in the skimpy clinical gown with your back exposed. Anna is in the waiting room, flipping through an old magazine.

They take your blood; they make you pee into a cup and then make remarks about your urine. You can't stop blushing. Thankfully, it doesn't take long for you to get out of there and over to the diner, where you work part-time as a waitress to help with the bills. You're old enough to earn your keep. Are you old enough to have a child?

Rose is wiping down tables; she looks old and tired and annoyed. "You need to get here earlier. I shoulda thought you'd do your mother a favour and relieve her a bit early."

"Shut up, Rose." It's a normal reaction and she doesn't flinch. "Ingrate."

"Drunk."

Mary comes out of the back room and grimaces. "Shut up, both of you."

What a fucking family.

Two weeks pass and they call you at home. Rose intercepts the call, but you snatch the old phone from her and thank God there's only one in the trailer. "Yes, it's Isobel Stevens."

"Your results are positive. We need you to come into the clinic as soon as possible."

Positive. It's not a positive thing. There's nothing happy about an unwanted child at sixteen years old. It's not positive that you've become Rose.

You hang up the phone and burst into tears, and Rose looks alarmed. Mary puts her arms around you. "Cricket, shh. What happened? Who was it?"

You don't want to say; it's almost like spitting in Mary's face to disappoint her a second time. But it comes out, anyway. Sixteen has no filter. "I'm pregnant."

"You little slut!" Rose is listening behind the kitchen door. "After EVERYTHING? After all the warnings? After your goddamn upbringing?"

You bow your head into your hands and Mary rubs your shoulders. "Izzie, shh. Fuck off, Rose."

"Well, don't think you're keeping it. I hated having a brat when I was sixteen; I'm not going to raise yours." Rose lights a cigarette and bangs the old steel door so that it bounces against the frame.

The pain is almost worse than when he put it inside you. Nine months later, the rape seems almost like a pleasant memory.

Anna is sympathetic as she smokes cigarettes with you outside the old arena. "So put it up for adoption."

You're not smoking. You turn your head from the fumes. "I guess so."

"You've got time, Iz. You don't have to decide right now."

"I'm not aborting it."

"So don't."

"I hate it already." It's the thing tying you here; you can't get out. You're the stereotype you hate.

"So don't keep it."

You suddenly gasp; the tears are painful. "Oh, God." Anna drops the cigarette and puts her arms around you, drawing you close. "Don't, Izzie."

"You don't get it!"

Her face becomes shadowed; actually, you don't know if she does get it. You change tacks. "I'm tired."

"I know." You lie your golden head on her shoulder and she rubs your back. The kiss happens suddenly – you initiate it, but she doesn't back down. It's short and weird, and when you're finished, you almost want to wipe your mouth.

"What was that?"

"I don't . . . I just don't know."

You never will. It's the first and last time you kiss Anna.

Rites of passage are life-changing; they're supposed to be. Milestones are just that – memories you're supposed to cherish. No one says that sometimes they're not all sparkly and beautiful, like a Christmas in a catalog.

They can, however, be tender. Painful and tender and sore to the touch. But there's something good in soreness; they shape what you do when you're in pain. You might take your sorrows out in a kiss. You might remember liquid and stars and wet grass under the bleachers.

The main thing is, you remember. And sometimes that's all you need.


	5. Chapter 5

**Part 5**

When do you stop being a child and become a woman? There have been different opinions. Some people say it's when you experience an epiphany about your life. Some people say it's when dreams turn into reflections, and you can use them to determine your future. Some people say that you never grow up until you've experienced what it's like to give birth to a child of your own. Why is it that giving birth to a baby stops you from being a baby? You don't necessarily grow up. You don't necessarily change your ways. In fact, some people would argue that you don't change at all.

But there is a difference in your demeanour. You move more softly. You might put a hand on your abdomen to protect it in a crowd. Even if you know that this baby will never be brought to term, you might stop drinking coffee or taking certain pills. For the first time, you're responsible for something that's completely dependent on you.

How can you remain a child?

When the stick turns blue, all you feel is a sinking sense of dread.

You're thirty-eight years old. This isn't a big surprise. You've had the pregnancy scares before, but your period's been erratic and you've been stressed about your new responsibilities at Mt. Sinai, and the sex at night has been hurried and desperate, a stab at a relationship that's dying because passion burns out hotter than love does. Maybe you've forgotten your pills a few times. Maybe he forgot the condom. Whatever. The main thing is, what's done is done, and now you have to tell him about this baby.

Despite your age, you're not ready. You may have been married once, but a part of you still believes that if circumstances got really bad, you could move home. Your father wouldn't welcome you, and chances are, your mother wouldn't really care, either, but they wouldn't turn a child of theirs out into the snow, as it were. You do have a trust fund that you've barely touched except to pay for medical school. But it's not even the financial circumstances – it's the fact that imagining yourself as a mother actually makes your throat close, a little bit. And it's not even that you don't want a child. You just don't want one with someone who isn't guaranteed to be there through the four AM vomiting and one hundred and three-degree fevers.

Mark comes into the bathroom wrapped in a towel. "Are you almost finished, Addie?"

He doesn't even notice that you're still sitting on the toilet, a pregnancy test in your hand. "Mark! Jeez, don't you believe in privacy?"

He grins at you; a long, slow, sexy grin that should annoy you, but lights a glow in your stomach, instead. "I've already seen every part you have. Are you going to get into the shower or just sit on the can all day?"

You open your mouth to answer him, but burst into tears instead. Immediately, the grin slides off his face to be replaced with concern. "Addison?"

You wordlessly hand him the pregnancy test, which he takes gingerly, a confused look on his face. "What am I supposed to be looking at?"

"It's positive, Mark! I'm pregnant, okay?" Your voice is sharp, fogged with tears. "I'm still technically married to Derek and I am pregnant. And he's in Seattle, and you're here, and I don't know what to do."

He drops the pregnancy test on the counter and stares into the sink for a moment. You sniffle, blue eyes bluer with the infusion of tears, and get up, flushing the toilet and walking out of the bathroom. The need for a baby is so strong; it tugs at your heart and settles behind your eyes and in the pit of your stomach. It's just the wrong time. It's the wrong person. How can you raise a child who was conceived in such difficult circumstances?

You hear Mark behind you and turn away. "I'm sorry."

He wraps his arms around your shoulders. "This," he whispers, "is the best news I've heard in awhile. Congratulations, Addie."

You can hear the smile in his voice and a flare of hope flashes through your heart. "Really?"

"Yes, really." He kisses you, his lips soft against yours, the fresh taste of toothpaste still on his teeth and tongue. You cling to him tightly, imagining the little life inside of you, snugly between its parents, and maybe – just maybe, you can start believing it's all okay.

You change your mind on a rainy day in the late fall, when you slip on the street and fall with a crash onto the sidewalk, twisting your ankle painfully. When you call Mark's BlackBerry, he takes two hours to get to the coffee shop across the street where you fell. He didn't have a surgery. He didn't have any excuse. You find out later that he was in bed with the hot scrub nurse from OR Two.

The same night, he presents you with a Yankees onesie that he bought from a street vendor outside of the hospital. It's cheaply-made and the print is made to peel off, but you take it and run your fingers over the pinstripes. "Oh, Mark."

"It works for a boy or a girl. Either way, our baby's going to be a Yankees fan." He cuddles you close against his chest and you sigh. "Where were you today?"

"I saw your missed calls. I'm sorry." His voice is soft, and you pull away. "That's not an answer to my question."

"Addison. I was at work. It's not like you've never missed one of my calls."

"You weren't in surgery."

He throws up his hands. "I'm going to chalk it up to the hormones; I can't understand why you're so suspicious."

"Hormones, Mark?" You see red and pull away from him. "You weren't busy. You were with Kim again."

"I –"

"Just don't, Mark. It's fine. We never said we were exclusive. But I can't help but wonder why you can't commit, especially under the circumstances."

"I can commit! I just don't know what you want, Addison!" He runs an agitated hand through his hair. "You push me away at night. You get jealous if I don't answer your calls, and you don't let me come over for days. You're pregnant with my child, but you don't know what you want. How am I supposed to be what you want if you just won't tell me?"

"This isn't going to work."

"Fine. I'll leave." As soon as the door closes behind him, you pick up the phone and pull the wrinkled clinic business card from your pocket.

Two weeks later, the hope in your belly is nothing more than blood on an OR room floor.

"Well, you can't have an abortion, Cricket. You'll go to hell." Mary's voice is matter-of-fact, and inwardly, you marvel at the cool judgement. It's not the time for a Sunday school lesson, however. You curve your hands around your belly.

"I don't know what to do with it."

"Well, you could keep it." Immediately, you shake your head. "That wouldn't work. I'm not going to be stuck here like Rose was. I don't want it."

Mary looks sad. "This isn't your fault, sweetie."

"It wasn't her fault, either." You blink back tears. "But that doesn't stop her from hating me."

"You're not Rose."

"But I feel the same way. And anyway, she'd do something to make the child hate me, to punish me, somehow. I need to leave, Grandma."

Mary leans forward and puts her arms around you. "Don't kill it because of your own selfishness, Izzie."

You pull away. "What am I supposed to do?"

The next day has you in the adoption office, just outside of Seattle. Mary has your hand in hers as the lady explains the process. "So, essentially, your baby will be placed with a loving family that you have screened. You get to choose who your child goes to; in fact, you have complete control over the whole process."

You shake your head in confusion. "What if the parents turn out to be bad people? If I'm carrying this thing to term, I want it to at least have a good life. More than I can give it."

Mary strokes your hand. "Izzie. You don't have to make this decision right now."

"It's a good alternative. Many religious girls choose this route as opposed to abortion."

You look down at your belly. Sometimes, it's like you can feel it swimming in there; doing back flips around your body, taking over. You're sixteen years old. Who makes this decision without a loving hand?

Mary won't make it for you, but neither will she let you abort it. You sigh. "Fine. Get it started."

As you sign on the dotted line, you feel your control over the situation, what was left of it, slip away.

They put you in the pregnant girls' class and give you Family Studies worksheets to complete for replacement credit. You sigh, connect the dots, A, C, D, bottles, formula, breast milk, before you throw down your pencil angrily. You're normally a very good student, but this is just ridiculous.

"Why can't I go back to biology? Can't I work on some math problems, instead? I'm not even keeping this." You point at your rounded belly and ignore the bovine stares of the other girls around you. Only one other girl understands, but she's skipping class today and you wish you had, too.

"Isobel, sit down, please." The nun at the desk doesn't even look at you. "You know why you're here. You know why you can't mix with the other children."

"Because of my sin, right?" You push back your chair. "Fuck this. Fuck all of this."

"I'm warning you, young lady. Sit down, or face suspension. This is ridiculous, Izzie." The nun's voice is still calm, but you refuse to be calmed. "I don't want to stay here! I don't want to learn how to look after a child I'm not even going to keep! I want to get out!"

The tears start, then. Damn the hormones. Somehow, you find yourself in the hallway, facing Sister Catherine, who runs the preggo class. You've never really spoken to her, but her voice is soft. "Izzie. I don't think you realize what you're doing, here."

"I don't think you realize anything about me or my situation!" You're up in her face, but she holds your wrists down and you calm in a minute. "I'm sorry, Sister." You wipe your fist roughly across your eyes.

"If you cause trouble, Izzie; I can't write you a letter of recommendation for the college you want to attend. And I very, very much want to help you. You're a deserving student." She tilts your chin up, meets your eyes. "You are rising above this. Don't let it pin you down."

You want to wrap your arms around her, but you restrain yourself until she gives your shoulders a small squeeze. "Come on. Let's go back and finish your work. You can work on algebra problems for the rest of the period."

You wander back to class behind her and wonder why sin is such a different definition in the same situation.

You choose a family in Southern Washington, close to the Oregon border. They're Catholic, well-off, and desperate for a child. No matter what this child is and how it destroys your life, you're not about to let it suffer like you did. It's either abort it or give it to someone deserving. They're deserving.

You don't meet them, because it would be too hard, but they send you a card that you open after the baby's born. In it, there's two simple words.

"Thank you."

The labour starts while you're at home on a summery July morning. The trailer is already hot and you wipe a sweaty hand across your forehead. You've gained close to forty pounds and getting around is hard. Of course, Rose's taunts of "fatass" don't help, either.

Mary hears your groans and creaks on the old wooden bed and helps you get dressed for the hospital. She pins back your blonde hair, wipes your face with a cool cloth. Rose stands at the door as you get ready to leave.

"What, Rose?" The pain is coming in waves, but it's manageable. You stand in front of her. "Get out of my way."

Her face is still hard, but she sighs. "When the doctors ask you if you want an epidural, say yes. If they don't ask, demand it."

"Why do you care how much pain I'm in?"

"Because you don't even get the reward of keeping the baby afterwards." She suddenly hugs you, tightly, before you can pull away. "I love you, Izzie."

Twenty hours later, Sarah Elizabeth Stevens is born. At seven pounds, twelve ounces, she's a good-sized baby with your eyes and chin, but she isn't yours and she's taken away before you even get a good glimpse of her. You wanted it, but part of you wishes you could have held her, just once.

Her name doesn't stay Sarah, but when you talk to her through the years in your mind, Sarah's what you call her.

It's such a transition; baby to child, child to adult. It's full of considerations that you never feel ready to make. It doesn't stop at the worksheets or pamphlets put out by the hospital. In the end, it doesn't matter if you used cloth diapers or if you formula fed. In the end, it matters how the baby was raised.

If you can't raise it, don't have it. That's one option. If you can't raise it, let someone else do it who can. That's another option. They're cut and dry on paper, but it's not so easy when you're emotionally attached.

It's looking forward and looking back, and even though one of your many labels is now "Mother" in some sort of convoluted way, you still cling to the label of "Child", too.

It's never an easy thing. In the end, you live with what you've done. Hopefully, what you've done is the right thing.


	6. Chapter 6

The fact is, you're in school all of your life. You're always learning, even outside of an institution. Life is a learning experience. That's just the facts.

What no one tells you is that you don't realize that until you get older. When you're a kid, all you think about is getting out of school. When you reach the age of eighteen, you're out of high school – off to college. When you graduate college, you think you're getting into the real world.

No one defines the real world. The real world is whatever you're living at the time. No one can really prepare you for what it's like to get a job, start a family, and live your life because they're already doing it. You're already doing it.

Except, no one tells you that until you figure it out for yourself. By then, it's too late.

What does it mean to be a doctor?

That's the question posed on the application to Columbia University's medical school. You've just turned twenty-three; you've been spending your summer sunbathing by your parents' pool and mulling over your options, and now, you're finding out that your chosen profession is sort of harder than you expected.

The shadow of the leaves dances over your back and the wind ruffles your papers. It's not that you're stupid; you're not. You graduated second in your class at NYU; you've volunteered and you were a research assistant in your fourth year. You flip onto your back and stare at the clouds overhead, feeling your eyes water and feeling the breeze over your stomach. Your father hates it when you lie around in a bikini all day, but what's the point of being home for the summer if you can't enjoy the sun?

What does it mean to be a doctor? Everyone has these dreams of being the one to cure cancer, or create a new vaccine, and you've logged enough hours in the lab to know that peering into a microscope can, in fact, be the most fascinating thing ever. But you're not a writer, and you know that you can't articulate the absolutely breathtaking experience of watching cells divide, seeing a burst of colour on the slide. You'd end up sounding stupid and juvenile, and in your head, you know that's not what a doctor really is.

A shadow falls across your pages and you look up to see Bill, your boyfriend for the summer. Bill and you met in the lab and you kissed over the aforementioned microscope. Half a bottle of cheap vodka and some stale pizza later, you were in his dorm room, fumbling drunkenly with a condom and trying to untangle your feet from the knot in his sheets. That was in the fall. Over the course of the year, you ended up going to mixers and dancing awkwardly in the corner to the latest Top 40 music. At night, he snored and you tried to glean romance from his smelly dorm room. It wasn't until the end of the year – until April, when you both suddenly realized that you weren't going to see each other after this year.

It was a sort of desperately touching moment. You had been sitting, cross-legged, on his unmade bed while he scribbled on a notepad, trying to study as much as he could for Anatomy before his exam in two hours.

"It's weird, you know. This is our fourth year." Your voice had been sort of musing, and he'd nodded distractedly. "Yeah."

"Bill." He'd looked up. "What, Addie?"

"Are you going to apply to med school with me?"

He'd put down his pen and stretched out his hand cramps. "Addison . . . I'm trying to study for an exam."

"I know." You looked down at the bedspread; you picked out a nub and started rolling it across your fingers. "I just . . . I . . ."

"I know." He got up and sat beside you on the bed, watching your fingers working the piece of lint back and forth. You leaned against him; he kissed your red hair. "You're so beautiful."

"Come home with me. To the Hamptons. Come home and visit me there."

Bill's family also has a house in the Hamptons, but he shook his head. "I have to work this summer, Addie. If I'm going to apply to medical school, I need something to put on my resume. You've been working all through school. I didn't do that."

You sigh. "Come anyway. For a week or so."

And he has. He leans over you now, scattering papers across the lawn and trying to kiss you. You jump up, annoyed, and pick up your papers. "That's my med school application, Bill!"

"Sorry." He doesn't sound contrite. He stretches out on your towel and smiles. "So, you got stupid questions on that thing, too?"

You sit cross-legged next to him. "Yeah. What does it mean to be a doctor?"

He leans back. "Lots and lots of money."

You smack him. "That's not what it means." You both giggle and he turns to look at you. "Hey. If you get accepted, does that mean we have to break up?"

You look at him in surprise. "I . . . well, aren't you applying, too?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know if I want to be a doctor, Addie."

You stand up and walk to the edge of the pool, leaning over and staring down into the crystal-blue depths. "I thought you were going to apply, too. You were so serious about in May. You told everyone at graduation that it's what you were going to do. I thought we'd do it together."

He shrugs. "I changed my mind. What's the point of going through four years of med school and then seven years of residency? It's a long time to be in school and learning how to do something. I want to be out in the real world, not in school forever."

You look over at him. "Well, I'm not changing my mind. I want to be a doctor."

"Fine. What's the matter?"

You can feel your face twisting a bit; you're more than a little stricken. "I just thought . . . you felt the same way. I was looking forward to going to med school with you."

He stands up. "Well, I'm not going. So, what does this mean?"

What does this mean?

You forget quickly about what it means when you're deep in learning about how to actually practice medicine. It's completely unlike anything you ever expected. You go to class, you do your practicum for hours in the hospital, practicing on cadavers and on each other (drawing blood was the worst). You're tired; you hate the word "thrombosis" and you can't remember a time that you didn't wear a white coat. And then you realize – this is what Bill meant. This is something you never expected it to be.

You notice him across the room when you're busy monitoring the IV fluids of a patient in the children's ward. Your teacher is talking to him, pointing out the pattern of a child's rash, asking him questions about it. As he answers, he brushes a hand across his eyes and you see that they're an icy blue. When he looks up at you, pushing his dark hair out of his eyes, he smiles suddenly, and you can't help but smile back. You direct it, however, down to the sick child beside you, who chooses that moment to throw blood up all over her nightgown.

Later, after the mess has been cleaned up, he comes over and picks up your charts, which have fallen beside you while you tried to juggle other paperwork. "Here, I think these are yours."

You look up, brushing your red hair back out of your eyes. He's got a warm smile; he's tall and a bit awkward and completely not really your type, but you smile back, anyway. "Thanks."

"I'm Derek Shepherd. I, well, I saw you across the room today, and I wondered: do you want to get a drink?"

Suddenly, alcohol sounds wonderful. "Yes. Yes, I do."

Your decisive tone makes him laugh, sort of nervously. You can see old acne scars on the edge of his jaw line, but he looks up at you with those clear blue eyes and you sort of get a little lost until he speaks again, sounding far away.

"Sorry, what's your name again?"

You laugh; he laughs too. "I'm Addison. Addison Montgomery."

Your relationship with Derek is slow and satisfying. You start out by kissing him sweetly goodnight just outside your apartment door; it escalates to awkward sex in one of the on-call rooms during a lunch break; you study together and he quizzes you on things. In short, you're the couple everyone starts to envy, and all the memories of Bill wash away.

Derek gains confidence when he realizes that you're not as perfect as you seem. You chew on the edge of your glasses when you're thinking; you fumble needles sometimes and you made a little girl cry during your Peds stint because you accidentally missed her vein when you were trying to take blood. You play with your hair a lot, but you're clever, and he learns a lot from you during your study sessions together. That doesn't mean just medical stuff – you teach him how to pleasure you and he learns quickly that tongues aren't just for talking.

In short, it's growing slowly. And you like that.

One day, you're standing by the nurses' station listening to the attending drone on about tonsillectomies, when Derek comes up beside you. His face is white.

"Derek, are you okay?" you whisper, one blue eye on the attending, who's waving his arms around and reminiscing about the tonsillectomies he has performed.

"No." He looks like he's going to be sick, and you turn your full attention to him. "What's going on?"

In response, he pulls you around the corner and smacks his hand against his forehead. "I totally screwed up. I think I might have killed a patient."

"What did you do, Derek?" Your voice is sharper. "Where's this patient?"

"He's down the hall."

The two of you walk down the hall to the patient's room. He's looking distinctly odd, and as you reach him, he seizes. "Shit! Derek! Why didn't you tell anyone about this? What did you give him?"

"The attending told me to give him morphine." Derek looks scared and you sigh. "Well, did you check his chart? Which attending?"

You look at his chart. "Derek! He's allergic to morphine!" You page your resident and hold the guy's head as he goes unconscious. "Shit, shit."

"What do we do?" Derek looks upset and you suddenly feel sorry for him. "Come on. Help me turn him on his side." As you do so, the guy vomits and just misses your shoes. "Ew." You step aside quickly as he starts to breathe again.

The resident bursts into the room and you slip out, leaving Derek to explain everything, but you run into what can only be the guy's family. He's got two small kids; his wife is crying. "Is he okay?"

You peek into the room; you watch as the resident acts lightning-fast and the guy's vitals stabilize. "Yeah, he is."

The wife gives you a hug and you suddenly realize.

This is what it means to be a doctor.

You didn't just kill a guy. It couldn't have just happened.

Nevertheless, the code's failing; you're standing helplessly to the side as your resident pumps on the guy's chest and administers the paddles, and you realize that being a doctor isn't about saving lives, all of the time. It's about learning the meaning of life, which is that it's so fucking fragile.

When you applied to medical school, Rose laughed at you. "You think that trailer trash like you can become a doctor?"

You shake your head angrily. "Why must you always shit on everything I want to do?"

She sighs, flicks her cigarette into the wet grass. You were sitting on the patio outside the trailer, under the awnings. The rain was pouring and the trees were whistling, but the smoke was so thick inside the trailer that you couldn't breathe anymore. So you came outside, and like the proverbial bad smell, Rose followed you out to rib you some more.

"You're not good enough for medical school. You're not good enough for anything." She's drunk again, which means that what she's saying means nothing, but it still hurts. You've worked for this. You worked through university and you graduated with top marks; you paid for Rose's psychic habit and alcohol and started a year later than everyone else, but it didn't matter because you were only eighteen, anyway.

And now, she's standing there, the product of so many mistakes, and you just turn away. "Fuck off, Rose."

"You think you're so much better than this family. You gave up your baby and you gave up your job at the diner; you walk around here with your nose in the air and wave away the smoke, and you know what, Izzie? You're not that much better than us, after all."

"Why does that matter to you? Why do you want me to fail?" You stand up suddenly; pushing her ashtray off the table and watching it smash onto the cement floor of the porch. Her eyes widen and she snarls.

"You're a little ungrateful bitch."

"What have I got to be grateful for?" You decide you no longer care about Rose; you push her, experimentally; she's drunk enough to stumble and that's when Mary comes out of the trailer.

"What are you doing?" Her eyes are flashing at you; she looks at her daughter, who is slowly getting up, her cigarette forgotten in the grass, her hands clumsy as she reaches out to hit you. Mary grabs her wrists and twists them down, and she stops, standing there, beginning to cry.

"She's such an ungrateful little bitch. She thinks she's so much better than us, Ma. And she wants to go to medical school. Who does she think is gonna pay for that?" Rose is swaying and Mary pulls out a lawn chair.

"Sit down, Rose." She pushes her daughter into the chair and takes away the whiskey. "Christ, it's not even one PM."

"Shut up." Rose slurs, and you explode. "No, you shut up, you fucking piece of trash. If I'm trailer trash, you certainly are, and you made me." You're shaking and Mary puts a hand on your shoulder.

"You need to calm down, Izzie. If I ever see you lay a hand on your mother again, you'll have to find another place to live. Got it?"

You nod; it is Mary's trailer. You never have been able to understand why she keeps Rose around – you never did ask. But you love Mary enough to respect her wishes. You step away from your mother, who snarls at you again. "Ungrateful little bitch."

"And you? Shut the hell up. Because I'm getting tired of you and your constant running down of your daughter. Do you realize that you have a wonderful, talented, responsible child here? She wants to better her situation, and all you can do is spit on her efforts. Look at you. You're thirty-eight and you're still living with your mother. You drink most of the day and fuck the nights away."

Mary draws a breath and tries to ignore the tears on Rose's face. "Izzie wants to get out and I don't blame her. You've always been abusive and now she's just giving you some of that abuse back."

She turns, bangs the trailer door shut, and Rose gets up and stumbles out into the rain. "Going to the bar."

"Good riddance," you mutter, and follow Mary into the house. She's slumped at the table and she's crying. "Oh, Grandma . . ."

"I hate that she hates you. I hate that you hate her. Go to medical school, do whatever you want, Izzie. Just stop fighting with her if you can. I just can't take it."

You put your arms around her shaking shoulders. "I'll do what I can to make you more proud of me than you are of her."

"I'd be proud of you anyway."

"Thanks, Grandma."

You meet Ella your first day of orientation. Everyone in Seattle's so polished; you feel like the back-country hick that you probably are. Even your accent's a little different; slower. She's got long dark hair and dark eyes; she's got long fingers and when she handles the needle in a patient's arm your first month of practicum, you can't take your eyes off her. And you don't know how she feels, but her eyes follow you when you lean down to pick up charts, and you smile.

She slides beside you in Parasitology and you grin. "Late to class?"

"Almost." She's out of breath and she's beautiful with her face flushed and her eyes sparkling. "I had to finish an assignment."

"Ooh, did you oversleep?" You lean closer to her; you smell her perfume. She grins. "No. I was just procrastinating."

The teacher raps the desk for attention and you both open your books. However, you catch her stealing a glance at you from over her books and you blush as you feel warmth in your toes spreading all the way to your ears.

You end up sleeping over at her dorm one night after a drunken mixer and she kisses you; she tells you that she finds you attractive. Ella's so confident; she doesn't care that people might look down upon you for being lesbians, but you're weirded out about it and end up leaving her room in confused tears.

The next day, you're poking at an orange when she comes in. "What the hell was that last night, Izzie?"

You stop poking. "I don't know. It got . . . strange."

"Don't you like me?" Her voice is sort of upset, and you look up at her, meeting her dark eyes. She's from a culture like yours; you know that the Asians don't really look well on homosexuality. You suddenly feel like a bitch.

"I'm so sorry. It wasn't rejection."

"No?"

"No! I like you, Ella." You get up and pull her into your arms; she's smaller than you and she tucks her head under your chin and sighs. "I thought that you weren't attracted to me; that I misread everything and that I wrecked it all."

"You didn't. I just . . . it's not done, where I am. We're Catholic; we're a little town on the highway, four hours from here, one strip of population. I've never really done this before."

"I did it once. With a girl in university." She wipes at her eyes. "But she got weird on me too; she ran out on me."

You suddenly lean down to kiss her. Her lips are soft and she gently, softly, slips her tongue into your mouth. You're kissing in the classroom and it's dark outside and it just suddenly happens; she puts her hands down your pants and you buck against her fingers.

It's not weird then. It's not weird later.

The relationship is hot; your grades start to slip and you don't pay attention to certain medical procedures that you should be learning. So when you inject someone's IV and they code, you don't know what the hell went wrong. You're confused as hell and scared, and Ella shoots you a look as she pages the resident.

"I don't know what you did here. I don't know what to tell you."

"I don't know what I did, either! I pushed three milligrams of atrophine; I did what the resident told me to do in this situation!"

"Izzie . . ." She blushes and you know she wants to go. She doesn't want to be mixed up in this. You sigh. "Just go."

She leaves the room and the residents work on the guy, who ends up dying of an air bubble in his veins, effectively stopping his heart.

You cry in your dorm room later and Ella comes back. "I'm sorry."

"Just don't."

"Izzie." She sits beside you and leans her head on your shoulder, and you look at her. "I just . . . I'm sorry. I got scared. It got weird."

"It got weird."

"Yeah."

You put your arms around her. "Okay."

She lies down beside you and kisses your neck. "It wasn't your fault."

"Yes, it was."

So, being a doctor. It's not really about making lots of money, or saving lives, or failing to save lives, or administering the right amount of medicine. It's not one of those things. It's all of those things. And you can list them in whatever descending order you want, but the main thing is, what's important to you is what's going to teach you.

Medical school can be a time where you learn what you need to become a good physician. It's also another step on the road of life. Maybe you find out that you're different than who you expected yourself to be. Life and death in such close proximity change that.

No matter what it is for you, you can be certain of one thing. When you fill out the application, what it means to be a doctor will completely change by the end of your residency.

It's the way it is. It's the way you grow.

It's simply, at the end of it, life.


	7. Chapter 7

Responsibility

Responsibility. It's not something that comes when you get an MD. It's not something that comes when you turn a certain age. Responsibility comes when you've been forced into it. It's a badge of honour that's given to you when you've really tried hard; when you've been thrust into a situation and had to react for the greater good. Responsibility is the biggest part of being a doctor. Responsibility is something that once you have, you can never get rid of.

/

The world's stopped spinning. You've stopped getting sick in the mornings or running out of the ER, bile rising at the sight and smell of blood. The cramps have stopped coming in waves, forcing you to sit down; forcing your body into a jackknife, protecting the hurt and the betrayal and the stupidity. The guilt doesn't live in a big ball in your stomach. Now . . . now you feel in control.

Between the grudging like of Derek's mistress and the feeling of tears behind your eyes at inopportune times; between the knowing you're the best at what you do and being totally wrong-footed by a new hospital, new policies, new everything, you know it. The red hair you used to hate is your crowning glory. While everyone stumbles about in wrinkled coffee-stained scrubs, clutching chunky Styrofoam cups of sludge with barely-alive cream curdling at the top, you sweep by with a china mug of green tea, your skirt swirling around your legs, fuck-me heels clacking on the worn tile.

Yes, you're the cheating wife that's come back to take what's hers. Yes, you pretend to ignore the curious, scornful stares from Meredith Grey and her pack of insolent intern friends. But you own your department. You own the stares of the men in the hallways. You own Derek and his shit-eating grin. And your pride remains unhurt here.

Writing in your charts used to be so annoying, but you find it soothing, now. Your handwriting is clear and unlike a normal doctor's hurried scrawl. You enjoy filling out the fields, updating everyone on the patient. You plug in your iPod and ignore the world.

So when she stands beside you – you, normally so poised, so elegant, put together and always aware – end up jumping out of your skin, and the end of a long sentence filled with medical shorthand and description trails off into an uncertain line. The black fountain pen – your father gave it to you on your graduation from medical school – clatters onto the floor, leaving a dotted ink ellipsis across the white tile.

"What?" Your voice is harsher than you intend, but you hate being startled. She's an intern – that much is clear. Her scrubs are pale blue and carelessly untucked at the hip. The shirt trails in carefully-deconstructed wrinkles over her curves, framing her figure, which is damn near perfect. Since the pregnancy, you've noticed a slight roundness of your abdomen that just won't go away, no matter how many sit-ups you do. You weren't even pregnant that long, and already your body started piling on the fat.

Her blonde hair is tied back into a messy ponytail. Her brown eyes are red-rimmed behind truly ugly glasses, but her skin is creamy and clear, her lips turning up at the corners. She stands nervously before you and yet she doesn't seem cowardly at all.

Her eyes are sad, but her voice is steady. "I'm Izzie Stevens. I'm assigned to work with you today."

Your annoyance at your perfect chart being messed up fades. Her voice is matter-of-fact, feminine. It holds a no-nonsense note, yet it's modulated, soft. You stand, putting out your hand. She takes it. You grin a little, remembering when your hands didn't need gallons of lotion to stay that soft.

"Addison Montgomery." You see slight judgement cross her face, but you ignore it and hold her gaze. For a few moments, you're locked with her – the depthless dark eyes, the knowing gaze. However, she breaks your gaze first, and looks down, her cheeks flushing slightly. It's about then that you feel a jolt shoot through you, and let go of her hand.

"Well, you can start with the post-hysto in 1450. Then, check on 1471 – she's a high risk pregnancy and she likes to get up and walk around, even though I put her on bed rest a week ago."

You enjoy giving her orders – her face closes, but she says nothing. You know she's passing total judgement; her eyes rake your salmon-coloured scrubs and your messily-tied up hair. You didn't bother to change after your last surgery, and you know you look good, even tired and rumpled. If her scrubs outline her hips, yours practically define your own.

You watch her walk away, her hips swaying slightly from side to side, back perfectly straight, and involuntarily wonder what it would be like to touch her skin. You suddenly call her back.

"Stevens?"

"Yes?" Her voice holds a hint of insolence, and you smile inwardly. She's not one to take things lying down, you see.

"After you're done, get back here. I've got a lot to do today and I don't have time for slacking. It shouldn't take you more than half an hour to finish your rounds."

Her face hardens; her eyes flash a challenge. You allow yourself a smile and her cheeks redden.

"Yes, Dr. Montgomery," is all she says. You stare her out of the room and get back to charting. Responsibility is your middle name, these days. You're never late with your charts.

This time, however, it's not distracting you from your conflicted thoughts about Derek, Meredith and Seattle.

This time, all you can think about is what your intern is doing out of your sight.

/

You hate her on principle, but the fact is, she's not really that intimidating when she's standing in salmon scrubs. She's about two inches taller than you; her hair is a brilliant fiery red and her smile is bright and wide. But she doesn't smile at you – she challenges you. And despite your annoyance at being treated like less than you think you are (and you're aware that interns ARE, indeed, the bottom of the food chain), you can't help but notice the flash of her blue eyes – the slight flush of her ivory skin.

You badmouth her later to Meredith and Cristina. "Honestly, she's so stuck-up. And what self-respecting surgeon wears salmon-coloured scrubs?"

"Seriously," Meredith agrees through a mouth of chili fries. Cristina takes a sip of water and proceeds to choke as it goes down the wrong way. As Meredith pounds her back, a piece of fry falling from her mouth, you hear a smooth, cool voice.

"Gonna live, there, Yang?"

Addison stands behind Meredith's chair, and Meredith flushes miserably. But Addison isn't there to assert her authority. Her gaze is fixed on yours. "I need you, Stevens. Now."

"I'm not finished lunch yet," you mutter in annoyance, but get up anyway, dumping the rest of your salad into the trash. She says nothing; simply leads the way, her hair swishing coolly over her lab-coated back. On the way, she updates you.

"33-year-old woman pregnant with quints; due to deliver in 10 weeks. She's on bed rest until she delivers, but it's a high risk pregnancy; at least three of the quints have medical problems. I need you to keep an eye on her stats, do what you can to keep her comfortable."

She fixes you with a look that skewers you into the floor. "I don't need to tell you how important this is, I'm sure."

You almost feel like snapping back at her, but you restrain yourself. "Yes, Dr. Montgomery." Your tone says, "Of course I know, you bitch."

Her eyebrows raise; she leans closer to you, her perfume wafting over you both. "Do you have a problem with what I'm saying, Dr. Stevens?"

You almost snap at her then. Yes, she's your boss. Yes, she's above you and an absolute wunderkind and madly skilled. But in that moment, she's just another woman. And she's a woman who has hurt one of your best friends.

"No, Dr. Montgomery," is all you say. She nods, then smirks.

"Didn't think so."

/

It's a long three days. The babies come early. Dory, the mother sinks so far into post-partum depression you fear she'll never come out. She refuses to touch her babies. She refuses to even look at them. And they are so fragile, tiny, translucent little dolls, opening and closing their tiny mouths like newborn birds. They can't even squeak. It's like they're not even real.

Emily is the quint that you're hanging over. You've been watching her so long that you feel like you know every inch of her, every expression. Every fibre of your being is fixed on making this baby live. And a tiny part of you wants to prove to Addison Montgomery that you can do something right without her watching your every move.

Addison sweeps in, all Bulgari perfume and swishing expensive clothes. "I'm leaving, Stevens. Under no circumstances are you to let this baby die. She better be alive in the morning."

"Are you going to carry your BlackBerry?"

She laughs, her voice slightly derisive, and you blush. "Well, it's a valid question!" you snap, partly out of exhaustion and stress. She lets it slide, but her face changes and she raises her eyebrows at you. You know yourself that you don't have many more free bitchy moments with Addison before she finally snaps on you. You're not scared, but you don't really want to piss her off, either.

"I'm going out, Stevens. I will not be on-call tonight. You will be and you will watch that child all night, do you understand me?"

Her eyes flash; yours flash back. "I get it," you snap.

"Good."

That had been hours ago. You're exhausted; there's drool on the cover of your textbook and the baby's chest keeps caving in. It's getting exhausting, struggling to keep her alive. You've always been taught to let a dying person go. But responsibility steps in. You keep pushing the drugs. You keep doing infant CPR, until it becomes a freaking habit, and she codes regularly – you could set your watch to it.

And then, she stabilizes. While her little body rests, yours does, too. And just like that, responsibility ceases to exist.

When you wake up, her body's gone, lying in the morgue instead of right in front of you. And in the back of your head you know you couldn't have saved her. She was too sick, too weak, too small. But you feel responsible, anyway.

Dory holds the baby in her hands, the little head resting on her fingers, and she cries. You stare hopelessly through the plate-glass, your eyes alternately blurring the metal mesh embedded into the glass and focusing sharply on it.

She appears while you're trying to hash it out in your head.

"Stevens, she wouldn't have lived anyway."

"What?"

"She was too little, too sick. I told Dory last night that she wasn't going to make it."

"What? You did what?"

"I told Dory that her baby was going to die, Stevens." Her voice is so gentle, and you suddenly hate her for it.

"You made me so worried, made me promise not to lose that baby. I stayed up for 48 hours straight. I pumped her full of drugs. I sat by her bedside – hell, I couldn't even pee for hours because I was afraid the minute I stepped away, she'd die. And you're telling me it was all for nothing?"

You can feel your voice breaking, rising. Addison's face doesn't change, but her eyes soften. "It's for your own good. It's to teach you what to do in a situation like that."

Her voice grows harder. "I'm not here to make friends or get you to like me. I'm here to teach you. Can't deal with it? Get out." She flings a hand at the door, and you suddenly begin to cry, feeling like an idiot and like a victim, even though you know you shouldn't. But it's more than you can take right at the moment.

She puts a hand on your shoulder, clearly feeling awful about what she said. "Stevens."

You just snuffle into your hands, not wanting to look at her. She insists.

"Stevens, look at me."

You finally raise your eyes to her and see not pity – not sympathy – but simple understanding.

"You did everything you could to save that baby. You did EVERYTHING you could."

You snuffle again. "Yeah."

"I recognize that. I'm proud of you for that. I'll always remember that dedication."

And with that, she walks away and doesn't look back.

/

Responsibility bites. When you have it, you have the control and the power. When you don't, you have nothing but yourself to blame when things go wrong. It's a double-edged sword.

Kind of like loving someone you can't have.


	8. Chapter 8

It's trite to say that death is a new beginning

It's trite to say that death is a new beginning. In fact, to the person that deals with it, death is the end of an era. It's the end of a relationship – it's the end of emotion, love, and understanding. Death is more than just the passing of a spirit. It's the passing of things you never said. It's the passing of conflicts never resolved – emotions never expressed. And maybe that's what's so hard about death – not that the person has started a new chapter in another book, but that they can't finish the story in yours.

/

His face is grey. That's the first thing you notice.

At the door of the room, it's easy to think maybe he's just sleeping. He sleeps very deeply – there have been days you've slipped in to check his vitals and he never woke up. And he looked so peaceful at the time; his chest moved up and down evenly and his breath sounds were finally equal, not a trace of labour in them.

You'd pick up his wrist – his thick wrist with the fine hairs on his fingers and the surprisingly soft skin on the underside, feel the pulse beating underneath that network of veins and skin, that weak, thready pulse that got so much stronger after the LVAD was put in. But he was never one to be wired – he was a calm, horse of a man and he loved you.

You loved him, too – more than you let on, to him or to yourself.

Now, as you rustle across the floor in your beautiful evening gown – the right choice, even for this moment – you expect him any moment to wake up. You expect his eyes to open – and you expect him to smile. Because he has such a beautiful smile. The worst day can be transformed by that gentle, gentle smiles.

But his eyes don't open.

You tiptoe to the side of the bed – and realize that his monitor is still. The alarm isn't going off, and his face is grey.

His hand is cold when you raise it and slip your fingers over his radial pulse. It seems like a mistake, not being able to feel anything, and you push a little harder before you realize that his fingers are flopping awkwardly over your hand and that his palm is cold.

It's then that you begin to realize that nothing is right here.

It's then that you begin to scream.

After the body has been taken away and identified – long after the daylight breaks and you still sit in the chair by the door, your red dress flows around your legs and the tears drop onto the shiny fabric. It's not really silk – but it felt so beautiful when you put it on, that you spent the extra money to have it altered to fit you perfectly. Yes, it was a stupid high school prom – but you wanted him to see your beauty. For the first time, you were actually proud of it.

You don't expect to see Addison – in fact, most people are thankfully leaving you alone – but when she appears, you don't automatically shut down. It's not that stage yet; this is the stage of utter disbelief. It seems to you that he'll be back any minute. He's gone to surgery or something. He can't possibly be gone forever – not after all of the fighting and not after all of the lies; not after you fought to get him that fucking heart. He can't have died.

She sits beside you, and her perfume wafts around you both. She says nothing, and neither do you. In fact, you haven't said anything to her since the disastrous day when Emily, the little quintuplet, passed away. She's been the beautiful surgeon across from you and she's been the redhead that passes you in the hallway, but that's it.

Today, though, she gives silent sympathy. And although you would have ordered anyone else away – although you snapped at Alex even as you cried on his shoulder, and wouldn't even speak to George – you don't make her leave. You don't do anything at all. Instead, you let the tears drop down and you take comfort from her silence.

Her hand sneaks onto your knee – just in a mute sign of comfort. And then you suddenly heave – the sobs suddenly overwhelm you. Because you've just lost the love of your life. And now you realize what real sadness is. It's not about Rose and her drunken rages. It's not even losing the respect of people around you. It's about the fact that you had something – someone awesome – and that someone is gone forever.

It's a step that she's hesitant to take. It's a step you normally wouldn't allow. But maybe because you know she's capable of great, great empathy, you allow it when no one else, not even your closest friends, is allowed to go there.

You allow her to put her arms around you. And you put your face down on her shoulder – you let the tears soak through her lab coat to the expensive blouse beneath, and you become a mucusy mess, but somehow, the pain is appeased. It hurts so much that it almost feels like pleasure instead of incredible white hot needles, pricking every part of your conscience.

And she murmurs into your carefully coiffed hair; she strokes the bare part of your back with her surprisingly soft hands. It's almost too familiar and it's not something that either of you ever thought would happen. But it works at the time.

When you break away from her, she has tears on her cheeks, too. You don't kiss her in your pain, but you suffer guilt later when lying on the bathroom floor, you think of what it would have been like to kiss those slightly-pouting lips.

/

You've lost people before. Everyone's lost someone before.

But maybe she hasn't. The grief she's experiencing seems to be the fresh type – the horrible pain that you get when you lose a parent that you love, or the love of your life. Although you have a hard time believing that you could lose the love of your life when you've only known him for a month, you don't pass judgement. Stranger things have happened.

Izzie Stevens is a walking disaster. Somehow, you need to get her out of the Cardiac ICU before she's not able to be moved.

She sobs on your shoulder. You saw her order Alex Karev out so you know what she's capable of, but with you, she simply turned in, like a child or someone who trusts you infinitely. And she has no reason to – in fact, you were pretty sure she hated you before this. Rightly so, really. It's never an easy time to learn a painful lesson in patient care.

But now you can feel her tears on your neck, which you've never really felt before. And her arms are wrapped loosely around you, but you know that if you tried to pull away, she'd cling to you for dear life. You've never seen anyone this upset, and you've lost people before.

But as you try to stand, and she comes up with you, she doesn't let go until you gently disentangle her arms. And only then do her hands come up to her face, and she realizes where she is, and she runs out of the room to wherever she goes.

You've never lost anyone like that – but you did lose a marriage. Either way, when you lose something, it's very rarely not devastating.

You could revisit that night, but why? You get the call from Derek later on that evening – apparently, the latest group of interns are worried about Izzie Stevens. She won't get up off the bathroom floor.

You have no idea what you can do, but you imagine that Meredith has been bothering him about what to do and out of desperation, he called you. You find that rather rich, considering the circumstances, but you're not one to ignore a cry for help, even if it is from an ex-husband.

You don't relish going to the Queen Anne on the corner of Sumner and Block streets. It's a beautiful house, but never one you imagine setting foot in.

However, night falls and finds you standing at the door. Inside, you can see a shabbily-dressed room and Derek rises from the dusty couch to let you in.

"She's upstairs," he says, a little redundantly, but you manage to get up there without saying a word. The closed blue door looms in front of you and you suddenly wonder what the hell you're doing.

Turning to Meredith – the only one who will look you in the eye – you ask, "How long has she been like this?"

Meredith's voice sounds scratchy, like she hasn't used it in a long time. "Since last night. She hasn't moved."

The doorknob is cold under your hand, but you refuse to open it. "Okay, guys? She doesn't need an audience. Scatter, or something."

The attending's voice does the trick – they all scatter, except for George, who retreats as far as his bedroom and stands at the door, peering out at you like a five-year-old. You ignore him and step into the room.

Your first impression is that it's really cold in here. The window is open, and it's blowing moist, cold sea air through.

She lies on the floor and she's still wearing that pretty dress from last night. Her hair spills, a golden pool, over the floorboards and she's curled in a tight fetal position. She isn't crying. She isn't sleeping.

She's staring.

"Izzie?" Your voice rings out in the silence – one of the first times you've actually used her name.

The surprise of it causes her to raise her head, but she immediately drops it when she sees it's you. "What do you want."

It's not even a question, and you frown slightly, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, slightly behind her. You cross your legs elegantly.

"What is this?"

"What is what?"

"You know what I'm talking about."

And she sighs. "If you're going to do this, fuck off. This is my house and you're not my attending here. I don't owe a damn thing to you."

"No, but you could explain why you're lying on the bathroom floor."

"What about 'I don't owe you anything' don't you get?" Now she sits up, her face flushing. "Unless you've lost someone like I did – unless you've experienced what I feel, you should shut up. I mean it. Shut up and leave. You can stay if you're quiet."

You say nothing, and she lies down again. Minutes pass, until you can tell that you're interrupting her reverie. It seems to be the right time.

"I have, actually."

"What?" Now her voice is softer.

"I have lost someone. Not like you, but I lost the love of my life, too."

"When?"

"Three days ago."

She sits up again. "Who died?"

"No one died. That's the hard part. He's still living. And he hates me." You hear your voice crack, and you clear your throat.

She doesn't say anything, but her eyes show a little emotion. "Derek?" Her voice is so soft.

"Yes." And now the tears are on your cheeks. "I'm sorry. That's not why I came in here."

But she rises and walks towards you, sitting down beside your legs. "I didn't think of that. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too."

"How do you go on?" Izzie's voice is barely audible now.

"You just do." You clear your throat, pick at your manicure, and then meet her eyes. "It doesn't mean that I'm not lying on the bathroom floor inside, though."

"But he's gone forever. He's never coming back. And I loved him." Her voice cracks on the last syllable, and then she starts to sob, hard, her hands screwing into fists, rubbing into her eyes.

You lean down and put your arms around her, pulling her close to you, feeling her heart quicken with each sob; feeling her whole body shake.

"I know he's gone forever. But don't forget about the people who are here still.

"They're not him," she whispers.

"No one will ever be him. You didn't lose that."

After half an hour, she opens the door herself and walks out.

/

Death doesn't have to be the loss of a human being's life. It doesn't have to be the body dying – the spirit fleeing; whatever you believe in, energy moves. But it can move from one relationship to another. The spirit can die in love and be reborn again in another emotion. That's the thing with energy – it never stays in one place.

But at its core, energy never dies. That fact alone makes it worth chasing.


	9. Chapter 9

The hierarchy of the working world is set in stone

The hierarchy of the working world is set in stone. If you're an underling, you owe respect to the person above you. If you're a boss or a chief, you still owe respect to your underlings. Each serves the other – each supports the other. Without the underling, you wouldn't have a running business. Without the boss, the business wouldn't be managed.

The same happens in surgery. Without the attending or resident, the surgery isn't performed. Without the interns, learning doesn't happen, and the cycle doesn't continue. It's a given – or it should be.

But what happens when the lines are blurred? When attraction takes the place of respect? When feelings cover professionalism?

It stops being cut and dry. It becomes complicated. It makes you question yourself and your job, and brings home the point:

Don't get too close in the hospital. Nothing stays the same. Things change on a dime.

//~//

Surgery is an exacting science. One slip of the scalpel, and you can kill the patient. They say it in medical school, but until you watch the rise of the patient's chest and see the line of blood as you cut into the living flesh, you don't really understand. This isn't a cadaver, a fetal pig, or a cow's eye. This is a person who has a family – has connections and isn't clinical. This is where a personality can make or break a successful medical case.

You've proven to have trouble with it. Your attendings tell you so and you know it's true. But you can't help it; it's who you are. No one cared about you, so you over-care about them. It's interesting to you to hear their stories; meet their families. You catch yourself imagining holidays filled with warmth and love; glittering smiles and lots of light. Everything you didn't have, essentially – even though you know that it's to your detriment to care this much.

The first time you lost a patient in surgery, you cried. Right there in the OR, you cried. You had tried to wait until the room had cleared, the body taken away. But you couldn't do it – your chin began to quiver as soon as time of death had been called and Derek Shepherd had sent you an annoyed glare. You'd ended up crouching in the corner of the ER as the scrub nurses cleaned up, and after they'd left, shaking their heads. It's a bit of an embarrassment for an intern to openly break down in a public place – of course, everyone expects interns to be upset once in awhile, but decency suggests they find a place to cry in peace.

No one had come after you then. You'd spent the time, letting the tears soak into the sleeves of your gown; knowing you should scrub out, but not letting yourself. It was hard after everything. You'd known the family – or thought you had. And in the end, it was humiliating, being yelled at by Dr. Shepherd and not failing to move fast enough. It was expected, but it was humiliating, and you were upset. That was it, and that was all.

Later, once you'd gotten ahold of yourself, you'd come out into the hallway and run smack into Addison, who, you noticed, took immediate stock of your rumpled scrubs, slightly tousled hair, and teary face.

"Are you okay, Stevens?"

Her voice was soft – not accusing. And then you remembered what you'd been told about this woman – that she didn't teach with humiliation. You sniffled, crossed your arms.

"Fine, Dr. Montgomery."

Her hair had been pulled up in a messy bun, stuck through with two pencils. That alone had made you smile a little – you often did the same thing, and Meredith had been trying to get you to teach her how to.

"Ah, Stevens." She'd smiled a little bit – a very slight bit taller than you, maybe due to her heels, so that you had to tilt your head a little. "You're lying."

Her tone had been matter-of-fact, but the prying had sort of surprised you, and you'd just looked at her for a second before she turned away from you. "Anyway, I need you to help me on a case. Let's go."

Afterwards, she'd invited you to get coffee with her, and once again, gently tried to pry as you flop on a bed in the on-call room. "Stevens, don't get me wrong, here, it's not like Seattle Grace is the happiest place on earth, but you were crying. What happened?"

You shrugged. "Bad day."

"Lose a patient?"

You'd looked up, surprised. "How'd you guess?"

"I heard you were crying in the OR." She pulled a face. "But I also recognize the sentiment. I cried for hours after I lost my first patient. It's not easy."

"No." You'd looked down, thinking of the embarrassment, and felt a little startled as Addison bent her head to catch your eyes again.

"Stevens."

"I made a mistake. Didn't react fast enough . . . and Dr. Shepherd sort of yelled at me. It wasn't fun."

Her face softened. "Oh. Yeah, he doesn't suffer mistakes gladly." She reached out a hand and placed it on your shoulder. "Sorry, Stevens."

"Don't apologize. It's not your job to apologize for him." Your voice got harsh, and she raised her eyebrows. You quickly scrambled back. "Sorry, Dr. Montgomery."

She gave you a sympathetic look. "Don't take it so hard. He's just . . . like that, in surgery. If you get to scrub in, he considers it an honour. Stupid, I know, but that's the way it is."

Your lower lip trembled again and she suddenly reached out to give you a hug. "Shh. Let it go."

Hugging Addison was . . . odd. She smelled like expensive perfume and you knew this was her impulsive way of dealing with things, but you found it surprisingly comforting. You leant into her embrace and suddenly experienced a shock of raw wanting as she pulled back and you found yourself, inches from her face.

Her breath was sweet . . . and you leant forward, without really thinking it through, and kissed her.

Immediately, you thought you'd fucked up again when she froze. You could tell that a million thoughts were flying through her head, and you almost pulled back. But she gently cupped your cheek, running her fingers over your soft skin, tracing your ear as her other hand rubbed your back and she leant in deeper.

It made you feel better like nothing else does. And the best thing about the whole thing was that there was no awkwardness. It just stood there, and it was comfortable.

//~//

Kissing Izzie Stevens was far from weird, and that, you decided, was the strangest part of it all.

However, you didn't let it go any further. After rubbing her back, you slipped away and she lay down, curling into a fetal position, closing her eyes tiredly against the stress of the day. You have a Caesarean later and you decide that you'll let her scrub in – she should, at least, have a good experience to end the day on.

You do warn people about getting too close to their patients. You realize, at this point, that you could be accused of getting too close to your interns. That can be infinitely more dangerous – you have to work with them every day.

But Izzie's almost irresistible. She has such a sweet disposition. She wants to help so much, and her failings are almost virtues. You find yourself wanting to help, the flirtation and attraction notwithstanding.

So you invite her into your surgery.

"Stevens, I need someone to scrub in on my C with me. Feel like tagging along?"

Her face lights up like a Christmas tree. "Yeah, I would love that! Thank you, Dr. Montgomery."

Here's where you make your mistake. "Addison, please."

She blushes sweetly. "Addison," says she, shyly, and you suddenly want to kick yourself. This is far from professional. It's going to kick you in the ass. But you just imagine kissing her again . . . and the misgivings unfortunately float away.

She's not great in surgery. She's nervous and wants to prove herself. You know she'd be a better surgeon if she just calms down, but in a high-stress situation, you can't teach her the way you want to and you end up freaking out.

"STEVENS!!! If you don't hold the retractor in exactly the way I showed you, I cannot see what I am doing. Do you want to kill this child?"

"No, Dr. Montgomery."

"Then pay attention or see yourself out." You realize you just pulled a Derek, but you focus all you can on the baby and end up delivering him just before it's too late. You avoid Izzie's eyes as you dry the child off, check his vitals and start your newborn tests. "Stevens, get over here if you want to learn."

She stands quietly beside you, and after the newborn is pronounced healthy, you stand side by side and scrub out. She refuses to look at you, but you decide you don't care. You can't deal with interns who think they're too special to listen, and despite your better judgement and discipline as a teacher, you snap at her again.

"Listen. If you can't follow instructions exactly as I dictate to you; if you can't do it without attitude and without tears, then you can't scrub in with me. I will find another intern."

She says nothing, but bangs the water off and storms out of the room. Your red-headed temper nearly gets the better of you – you nearly storm after her, but instead, you rub your neck, wait five minutes, breathe, and walk out.

Later, you find her. She's staring at the ceiling and she's got tearstains on her face. Her face against the pillow is pale and tired, and despite yourself, you sit on the bed beside her.

"Shh. Stop crying, Izzie."

"What was that?" Her voice is barely audible. "What was that shit?

"What shit?" Your voice threatens to get sharp, but you calm down and keep it even.

"That . . . whatever that was in surgery. Yeah, I fucked up, but the stuff afterwards . . . you didn't need to say it. I already heard it once today. I get it – I suck. I need to learn. But you attendings sure don't make it easy, do you?"

You bite your lip, but listen to her.

"You yell and you don't listen. You just snap and get angry. And I realize that in a life or death situation, you can't coddle interns along. But . . . I guess I expected better from you, Addison."

You sigh, and she sighs, and you stare at her for a moment. "You're right. But it doesn't change the fact that in my OR, I am queen." You smile at her and after a minute, she smiles back.

"It also doesn't change the fact that just because I kiss you here, I'm still your boss," you remind her, and she puts her hand on your knee even while she nods.

"Are you attracted to me?" she asks.

In response, you lean down and place your lips on her forehead, tracing the bridge of her nose and the planes of her soft cheeks, and you feel her smile against you as her hands come up over your back, rubbing at the tight places just under your shoulder blades. Her hands slide under your scrub shirt as you kiss her neck, her ear, her chin and finally her lips.

Just before she gets to your pants, however, you stop.

"You had a bad day," you remind her, stroking her hair. "That's all you get for now."

She pouts a little, but smiles at you.

"Yes, Dr. Montgomery."

//~//

Respect is a two-way street. Despite the fact that both parties require it, both need to be willing to give it, as well. The lines cannot be blurred, or the working relationship is ruined.

But respect also means considering another's feelings. It means paying attention to needs and emotions.

Respect is the first step to a successful relationship – and one that must persevere if the relationship is to last.


End file.
